A Towering Playwright’s Tiny Library

“Shakespeare’s political beliefs are as elusive as his religion, his sexuality and just about everything else about him that matters,” writes the scholar Jonathan Bate in his perceptive new book, “Soul of the Age.” “Precisely because he was not an apologist for any single position, it has been possible for the plays to be effectively reinterpreted in the light of each successive age. In the four centuries since his death, he has been made the apologist for all sorts of diametrically opposed ideologies.”

Because so few facts are known about Shakespeare’s life, biographers have had to rely on speculation and extrapolation to flesh out his story, while writers focusing on his ideas and ideals — like Mr. Bate, who proposes in this volume to give us “an intellectual biography” of the playwright — face a similar difficulty, grappling with the plural truths and willful ambiguities that proliferate throughout his work.

Whereas Restoration critics, Victorian scholars, Romantic writers and postmodern theater directors have all embraced Shakespeare as a kindred spirit, uncannily ahead of his time, Mr. Bate argues that he “gave immediate emotional life to the ideas of his age,” and he sets out in this volume to create a portrait of “the man in the context of the mind-set into which he was born and out of which his works were created.”

This is not exactly a new approach to Shakespeare, even among contemporary scholars. In “Shakespeare, the Later Years” (1992) Russell Fraser examined the impact that recurring bouts of the plague had on theater companies in London and the fallout for Shakespeare and his colleagues of contemporaneous events like England’s war with Spain. More recently, in “Will in the World” (2004), Stephen Greenblatt looked at how the religious and political upheavals of the day, along with the aesthetic conventions of the time, shaped Shakespeare’s sensibility and his work.

But while “Soul of the Age” reconnoiters a lot of familiar ground, it is distinguished by the intimate, seemingly line-by-line knowledge that Mr. Bate — the author of “The Genius of Shakespeare” and the principal editor of the Modern Library/Royal Shakespeare Company’s complete works — brings to his subject’s writings and his ability to use that knowledge to trace the influences on those works with acuity and verve.

Mr. Bate’s book is awkwardly structured around Jaques’s famous “Seven Ages of Man” speech from “As You Like It,” and some chapters (most notably the one titled “Soldier,” dealing with Shakespeare’s knowledge of war and politics) read like essays that have never been properly integrated into the rest of the book. But as a whole the volume leaves the reader with fresh insights into the playwright’s work and a new appreciation of how he was both a representative and a contrarian man of his age.

In the opening section (“First Age: Infant”) Mr. Bate gives us a succinct assessment of how Shakespeare’s small-town childhood in Warwickshire left him with a sensitivity to nature and the changing seasons, and also, he speculates, with an innate conservatism : a tendency to be “cautious, traditional, respectable, suspicious of change.”

In the section titled “Second Age: Schoolboy” Mr. Bate argues that the intensive Latin lessons Shakespeare received in grammar school endowed him with a heightened sense of cadences and patterns, as well as a fondness for repetitions and amplifications, as in “Hamlet,” where “one epithet will never do when two are possible” (e.g., “disjoint and out of frame,” “the trappings and the suits of woe,” “an understanding simple and unschooled”).

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And in “Fifth Age: Justice” Mr. Bate notes that Shakespeare was quite wealthy by the end of his career, with assorted real estate investments and that as “a man of property,” he could have acquired the legal vocabulary that surfaces in plays as varied as “The Merchant of Venice” and “King John,” though “we cannot rule out the possibility that Shakespeare underwent some kind of rudimentary legal training in the 1580s.”

Drawing on a close reading of the plays and a daunting knowledge of Shakespeare’s many sources and inspirations, Mr. Bate hazards the educated guess that Shakespeare owned 20 to 40 books in a day when even literary men tended to own few. His library probably included, Mr. Bate speculates, Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s “Lives,” Holinshed’s 1587 “Chronicles,” a Bible in the Geneva translation and Florio’s Montaigne translation.

From Plutarch, Mr. Bate writes, Shakespeare learned a way “of writing history through biography” and the lesson that “the little human touch often says more than the large impersonal historical force” — or, in Plutarch’s words, that “oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sport, makes men’s natural dispositions and manner appear more plain than the famous battles won wherein are slain ten thousand men.”

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In Ovid, Mr. Bate notes, Shakespeare discovered a kind of soul mate who shared his understanding of human frailties and his reluctance to pass judgment on others, and in that poet’s magnum opus, “Metamorphoses,” he located a rich source of stories and metaphors of psychological transformation.

As for the essays of Montaigne, Mr. Bate suggests that Shakespeare found in them philosophical reinforcement of his own predilections: his understanding that “desire and sensuality are an essential part of what it is to be human,” his skepticism of “the Stoical faith in the stiff upper lip” and his inclination to trust hard-won experience over abstract theory.

The portrait of Shakespeare that emerges from this book — not dissimilar, it must be said, to many other historians’ views of the playwright — is that of a pragmatist: a realist about love, a canny political survivor (“he was the one dramatist of his generation never to be imprisoned or censured in connection with his work”) and a thorough professional when it came to matters of craft, capable of producing three new plays a year and tailoring his work (as in the case of “Macbeth,” written during the early years of King James’s reign) to reflect his monarch’s preoccupations.

Ambidextrous in talent, excelling at both comedy and tragedy, low farce and high drama, prose and verse, Shakespeare was, as Mr. Bate writes, “a realist as well as a romantic, a skilled politician as well as a supreme poet.” He was able to empathize with his characters while at the same time exposing their excesses and foibles; he could project himself into the fictional realms he created, even as he stood back and wryly commented upon them.

He was, as Mr. Bate puts it, “a countryman who worked in the city, a teller of English folktales who was equally versed in the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome.”

He adds, “His mind and world were poised between Catholicism and Protestantism, old feudal ways and new bourgeois ambitions, rational thinking and visceral instinct, faith and skepticism.”

In short: not only a man for all seasons, but also a man of his times.

SOUL OF THE AGE

A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare

By Jonathan Bate

Illustrated. 471 pages. Random House. $35

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: A Towering Playwright’s Tiny Library. Today's Paper|Subscribe